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Letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on Child Poverty and Welfare Reform
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November 2005
Dear John Hutton
Child Poverty and Welfare Reform.
May we first congratulate you on your appointment as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. We wrote to your predecessor on 19th October to raise concerns shared by our organisations on the proposed welfare reform. We emphasize those concerns to you here and ask you to consider these carefully as you take up your new role.
CPAG, Disability Alliance and One Parent Families have a shared interest in campaigning to end child poverty. The forthcoming Green Paper on welfare reform has the potential to help make progress in this area, and we therefore thought it might be helpful to write publicly in order to reiterate the importance of the Government's target to halve child poverty by 2010.
We congratulate the Government on the purpose shown in highlighting poverty as a problem, and child poverty in particular as an area for serious policy effort -- much welcome progress has been made. Still, we face a situation where latest figures (for 2003/04) show that 28 per cent or 3.5 million children were poor. Much more must be done to ensure that child poverty is rooted out permanently, and we believe there are three key areas for action.
Firstly, adequacy. To tackle poverty, benefits must be adequate for both children and adults. Currently, against the yardstick of the poverty line, they are not. We calculate the current gap (after housing costs) for a couple with two children to be in the region of £80. Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found the benefit level of income for a disabled person to be around £200 below that necessary to deliver a quality of life which was acceptable or equitable. We support your attempts to provide ladders out of poverty, but the inadequacy of the current safety net leaves individuals vulnerable to the snakes.
Secondly support into employment. Many people currently out of work want to work (Government quotes one million for workless disabled adults). In terms of people's own ambitions, Government is pushing at an open door. Sustained increases in support are needed to deliver here, such as through the Pathways to work programme and measures to ensure that good jobs are available. However, increases in conditionality, which risk forcing people with real barriers to work into jobs they do not want and may not be able to keep will be not only expensive but counterproductive. Research shows that the children who face the worst poverty are those in families that experience frequent transitions between work and benefits.
Thirdly, delivery. The last spending review appears to have hit the DWP hard, and we already have substantial concerns that Jobcentre Plus cannot properly deliver its existing programmes. Delivering additional support to enable individuals to take steps to move into paid work will require substantial additional staff and resources -- which we fear in the current spending climate may not be forthcoming. Ensuring that existing, effective services can be delivered is essential before implementing any programme of reform.
We strongly support the governments ongoing policy to reduce poverty but to do so successfully means looking at the complex, structural causes and making sure that delivery is sustainable. There are no quick fixes and we urge you to tread very carefully in this area.
Yours sincerely
Kate Green, Chief Executive, Child Poverty Action Group
Lorna Reith, Chief Executive, Disability Alliance
Chris Pond, Chief Executive, One Parent Families
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